Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Some thoughts about our recent provincial election and the net zero pay policy for political staff

I

In
the spring of 1996, when I decided to seek the BC Liberal nomination in my constituency
of Richmond-Steveston, the party was ahead in the polls and the conventional
wisdom was that Gordon Campbell was well on the way to becoming BC’s new premier.I thought I might become a part of the new
government.Well, I got elected.But in a surprising turnaround, the NDP won
the election and Glen Clark became premier.So I know something of the taste of defeat the NDP are experiencing in
the aftermath of Christy Clark’s stunning election win on May 14.I got over it, and decided to see if I could
become a good Opposition MLA.So, too, probably
sooner rather than later, will the NDP.

II

All
elections are an occasion to test old theories and wonder about the emergence
of new ones.

In
the months before the May 14 election I argued here that BC electoral politics
since the early 1950s could expressed in a single formula: when the centre and
right are united under a single party, that party wins; when they are divided,
the NDP win.(I don’t claim pride of
invention for that theory, which has long been a staple of BC political
analysis.)There was a point in the
months before the May 14 election when pollsters were reporting the BC
Conservative Party enjoyed the support of more than 20% of decided voters.That, it seemed to me, represented exactly
the recipe for an NDP election win.Over
the succeeding months, the BC Conservatives managed to mis-manage their way
into near-insignificance, such that by election night, their support fell to
below 5% of actual votes cast.No
threat, in the end, to the centre-right coalition under the BC Liberal banner.Perhaps the old theory still holds.

I
probably need to point out that any attempt to explain BC politics solely on
the basis of a single “left-right” axis is woefully inadequate.There are always other dynamic tensions at
play: urban-rural; insider-outsider; blue collar-white collar; and there is a
strong streak of just plain protest voting that needs to be taken into account
if you want to understand BC politics.So
the terminology which sees the “united centre-right” in opposition to the “left”
is only partly descriptive.But it’s
still pretty handy, in my view.It was
very powerfully and persuasively called into service by Christy Clark in this
spring’s campaign every time she expressed the choice for voters as between the
BC Liberals, who want to “grow the economy”, and the NDP, who want to “grow
government”.

So
it seems to me that the centre-right coalition survives, indeed thrives, under
Christy Clark’s leadership.The first
woman elected premier in the history of BC.With her own electoral mandate. And a caucus half of whose members are
new and were recruited by her, and the other half most certainly aware – or at
least they ought to be – that the only reason they have been returned to government
is because Christy Clark got them there.

This
is not just a question of where loyalty lies.It’s also about how decisions will be made, especially the tough
decisions, where there are good arguments on any side.In my view, the best political decisions are
made at the intersection between policy and politics.Doing the right thing just because it is the
right thing is rarely if ever good enough; you also have to discern what the
electorate will and will not support; whether this is a good time to create
political capital or spend it; and what the chances are of creating the coalitions
of support that will overwhelm the inevitable voices of opposition. That fusion
of policy and politics, when it works, is the magic of good government.In the end, all tough decisions are matters
of judgement. People can and will disagree.Someone, somehow, has to decide.What’s particularly interesting to me about this newly-elected caucus
and government is that the election result really represents – as much as
anything else - a profound vindication of Christy Clark’s capacity for
political judgment.Against the odds,
and in the face of all those who thought they knew better and said she was nuts
to believe it, she believed she had a message that would resonate with the voters
whose support she needed to win.She
played a game to win when many people thought the game was long since over.And she won.What that means to me is this: at the end of every caucus and Cabinet
discussion, at whatever late hour, when it’s time to make the decision, she has
earned the right to the last word, and to impose her political judgment.You could call it the moral authority to
govern.You might say that must be true
of all premiers and all times, but it’s not.It’s not something that flows automatically from holding the office. It’s
earned.And boy has Christy Clark earned
it.

III

The
news yesterday was about the government’s decision to increase salary ranges
for political staff.Predictably, the
NDP slammed the decision.It’s a measure
of the banality of our political discourse that people can generate any feeling
at all about a set of salary adjustments which – as has been clearly stated by
government - will not increase overall public expenditure.The suggestion that in some respect the
government was turning its back on its promises of fiscal prudence is
completely unfounded. Some people will be paid more.And no doubt some positions will not be
filled. The result is: no increase in expenditure. Or to put it another way, net
zero. That’s news?

But
I don’t mention this issue just to wonder why it’s even an issue.I’m more interested in NDP MLA John Horgan’s
reported statement that, “The public doesn’t like this stuff.”

Well,
I wonder about that.There are two kinds
of political conversations.One is a
conversation between and among, as Bob Rennie once semi-facetiously said to me,
the “800 people who send emails to each other about politics”.The other conversation is what happens inside
people’s heads when they finally enter the ballot box.The people engaged in that first conversation
are, in US political parlance, “inside the Beltway”. They pay attention to
every bit of gossip, every political staff hiring and firing, every instance of
carelessness or malfeasance, and every mis-spoken word or indiscreet
Tweet.For them, every slip is a scandal,
a new “something-or-other-gate”, another nail in the coffin of a government’s
political fortunes.And because they pay
such close attention, they think everyone else does, and they think it all
matters.(I should know; I’m one of
them!)

Folks
inside the Beltway thought, for example, that the so-called ethnic outreach
scandal – which took life from some leaked BC Liberal emails released by the
NDP on the first days of the brief pre-election spring legislative session -
would be the death knell of BC Liberal re-election chances. Ethnic-gate!

Were
folks outside the Beltway paying attention?Well, the voters of Richmond-Steveston handily re-elected John Yap, who
was the only elected official implicated in that scandal. Maybe they were paying attention, but it doesn't seem to have mattered much.

And
as Vaughn Palmer pointed out in his Vancouver Sun column today, the voters of
the constituencies along the BC Rail line have consistently re-elected BC
Liberal MLAs in three elections subsequent to the BC Rail sale, notwithstanding
the vigorous efforts of some determined people to keep the BC Rail “scandal” in
or near the news.

In
short, if this election result is any guide – and here’s the question about the
emergence of a new theory – the people engaged in the second conversation –
inside the ballot box, with pencil inhand – are perhaps not, in the end, actually moved by all that first conversation stuff. They may “care”, but it's not going to decide elections.

In
John Horgan’s mind, the public doesn’t like the fact that some political
staffers are getting a raise.Which
public?The folks he talks to on the NDP
caucus staff?Columnists, bloggers,
open-line radio callers? No doubt.But what
about the larger public?I wonder not
just if they care, but how much they care.I am mindful of something a friend of mine said the other day, that for
all our attempts to generalize, there are 1.8 million different constellations
of reasons why people cast their ballot a certain way.But even so, we generalize.And maybe what we learned from the last
election is that what really matters to the public are not the so-called
scandals that are the noise of day-to-day life inside the Beltway, but rather
the big questions. Questions like, which party and which leader will do a
better job, in the long run, and allowing for the ups and downs, the all-too-human
strengths and weaknesses that are as much a part of politics as they are of the
rest of our lives, of leading my province in a direction I want to go?On this point, the point of what it is that
really matters, I am quite sure, for British Columbia in the spring of 2013, Christy
Clark has a better answer than the rest of us.

7 comments:

Still no good excuse for brain dead Clark to give raises to these asshole on her staff after she promised to cut spending, salaries are the highest expense in government, she must forced to cut these increases to staff this is unacceptable, I hope she loses in West Kelowna, she will never be a good premier, as matter of fact this Liberal government will worse than the last one with Richard Coleman in it

Also people do not know how greedy these people are working in government. MLA's must be on a trial period for 1 year, if those in the riding do not like them after a year there must be automatic recall and a bi-election automatically triggered. The question still is why do so many assholes get into government

What specious nonsense. Hit the streets, ask 20 random people what they think about political staffers getting raises from $10K to $40K a year. Do they like it? I'll wait.

Back? OK, if people never hear about the raises, obviously it won't bother them. And even if they do hear about them, four years from now sure, it'll have receded to the dimmer recesses of 99.9999% of them. So, yeah, this isn't a vote determining issue for 2017, but as a former opposition member, you surely know it's the opposition's job to raise the profile of, and publicize to the best extent of their ability, the mistakes that government makes, the things that "people don't like". Like handing out raises to your minions as job #1 of a new mandate.

Bernard, those data are interesting but don't really tell you anything about vote splitting on their own. The comparison with previous years might give more leverage ("differences in differences") but in a single year the comparisons are tainted by the fact that decisions to run a candidate are not random, but instead largely have to do with the parties perceived chances. If we take the normal assumptions made about the Greens and BCCP this would lead us to predict that the BCCP ran candidates where the right wing vote is stronger and the Greens where the left wing vote is stronger. As such it is not surprising at all to see that in ridings where the BCCP didn't run the Liberals were also weaker, and v.v. for the Greens and NDP.